Motor Vehicles Agency Gets Stuck

Motor Vehicles Stuck With Look-alike Emissions Stickers

January 28, 1992|By BILL KEVENEY; Courant Staff Writer

Is the color aqua bluish-green or greenish-blue?

One of life's little mysteries for crayon-wielding 8-year-olds, it recently sent color wheels spinning at the state Department of Motor Vehicles, where this year's aqua emissions-testing sticker looks a bit too much like the blue one that expired in 1990.

"We ordered aqua. It was supposed to be greener than it came out to be. And through a tinted windshield, it does darken up," said Robert Waz, a division manager at the department.

The potential for confusion became quite real for William Mace of East Hartford late last year, before the DMV let the state's municipal police departments know that what they were seeing might not be what they were getting.

In an annual advisory sent Jan. 3, the motor vehicles department told police of the color confusion, but not before Mace became an apparent victim of the shadings of state emissions law.

Mace said he had obtained the new sticker early -- the aqua stickers that expire in 1993 were not in general circulation until this month -- after getting a new, tinted windshield last November for his 1986 Ford Escort.

In the next two weeks, he said, he was pulled over three times, twice in Manchester and once in East Hartford, because police thought his emissions sticker had expired.

"One day, the cop actually wrote out a ticket. I refused the ticket. When he read 1993, he ripped up the ticket," Mace said. "The thing that got me mad is that I've never failed to go to emissions."

After the initial confusion and a call to DMV, the Maces have had no more problems, Mace's wife, Virginia, said last week.

Officer Gary Wood, the spokesman for the Manchester Police Department, said a patrol officer had stopped a car because the sticker's color indicated it had expired.

Waz said he hopes the advisory to police and other factors will lessen problems caused by the stickers, which were made by American Decal of New Jersey.

First, he said, "1993" is printed almost twice as large on the new sticker as "1990" was on the old one. Second, most of the

out-of-date stickers are from the previous year, in this case purple stickers that will expire throughout 1992.

Finally, the vast majority of the 100,000 violations last year were discovered by DMV inspectors working in parking lots, Waz said. The inspectors, who generally issue warnings instead of tickets, are aware of the color similarities and also can see the dates on the stickers more easily than police officers can from patrol cars, he said.

It is not that easy to find a color that is bright, identifiable and not too similar to a color used in the previous few years, Waz said.

Red is used for failure stickers, so it is unavailable, and black and white are too easy to copy, Waz said. That leaves the DMV, which oversees a private company's operation of the program, with yellow, brown-gold, blue, green and purple, Waz said